Journal

Of all the
larger-than-life character portraits that have entered popular memory from the
1884-5 British Nile campaign – the future Lord Kitchener, a desert spy,
disguised as an Arab and carrying a cyanide tablet in case of capture; the wiry
and imperturbable General Wolseley, sticking to his plans against the odds; the
extraordinary Colonel Fred Burnaby, greatest adventurer of his age, wearing a
deerstalker and blasting away at the dervishes with his shotgun – none are more
impressive for me than James Deer, known to his people as Sak Arakentiake,
shown here in a photograph taken a few years after the campaign and the
inspiration for one of the fictional characters in my novel Pharaoh. He was a
Canadian Mohawk born on the Tyendinaga Reserve in Ontario and was one of 61
Iroquois invited to join the expedition by Wolseley, who had been so impressed
with their boating skills during his 1870 Red River Expedition in western
Canada. Originally the Mohawk had been part of the Iroquois Confederacy in what
is now New York State, and had fought alongside the British during the
Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 – to many the word ‘Iroquois’ still sends
a chill down the spine. But by the 1860s, resettled in Ontario and no longer
warriors, the Mohawk had applied their boating skills to the dangerous task of
bringing rafts of timber down the Ottawa River from the northern forests. James
Deer was one of the few Mohawk who spoke English well enough to act as an
interpreter on the expedition, and wrote an account published in 1885 as The
Canadian Voyageurs in Egypt; he was still giving talks about the expedition as
late as the 1930s. Despite their fearsome reputation the Iroquois on the Nile
were non-combatants, not once firing a shot at the enemy, but as boatmen they
won the admiration of all who served with them, and were among those who left
the Nile holding their heads high knowing they had done their best despite the
failure of the expedition to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum.